Today I am 60 – and what’s surprising is that of all these “milestone birthdays”, this one feels like I’ve crossed a bridge from which I cannot return. As if the past has shattered into the river beneath and now there is only the road ahead and my memories of what’s been left behind.
So many well-wishes this year – different from years past. It think this is COVID making us all more sensitive to the potential for loss – the possibility that tomorrow may not be as predictable as we imagined. I’ve heard from people I never expected to hear from. Maybe I’m different. A bit more approachable. More welcoming of these kind words.
I promised an autobiographical blog, so let’s begin at a reasonable beginning: 1928.
This is the year the only man I’ve known as Daddy was born. His father was a shipbuilder with no real formal education. Daddy was born to a mother who would die of a stroke at 33 when he was 10. He also lost a sister to pernicious anemia/pneumonia before he could remember her in 1930. His parents, likely devastated by the loss, separated and divorced before his mother’s death. He was sent to live with his father’s sister, Ann, whom we always called Aunt Mike, sometime after his mother died.
Daddy was a short man, 5’7″, with coal black hair. He was lean, smart and loved me to pieces. He smoked 3 packs of unfiltered Camels a day until he realized (too late) it would be the death of him. He fought a war with my brother (who doesn’t seem to remember that these days), but he would fight a war to defend me. In the worst of the days with my mother, he stood by me, until I was about 16 when it became clear that a storm was coming that neither of us would survive if we stayed on the same course.
An engineer by profession and a devotee of Ayn Rand, Daddy was my rock, my teacher, my menotor, my defendor, my counselor. I know that he only wanted my happiness. I think it was the belief that I’d found it that would ultimately allow him to leave us all so soon.
Everything about my life and my family changed with his untimely death at 63. What little connection I had with my mother quickly was lost as she became unmoored and sought refuge with my father-in-law. Sounds like a soap opera and it was. Daddy was gone, my son was about to slip into bipolar madness, and my mother would make decisions that would force us into an estrangement that would last until her death 25 years later.
But while he was alive, this man loved me for no reason. He didn’t have to. I wasn’t “his” child. I was smart, but I wasn’t easy. But he understood me. And I loved him so. Without him, I would not be where I am today. So grateful.